Balance and flexibility for homeschooling parents

Growing up, I was a competitive figure skater, which meant I spent hours each day on ¼-inch thin blades, tracing intricate figures, spinning in neat circles or landing jumps after multiple rotations in the air.

In addition to our time spent on the ice, my fellow skaters and I took other classes, including ballet. The idea was that jumps and spins were fine, but without grace and artistry, they were simple perfunctory.

Skaters needed to hold their hands in a pleasing way. They needed to tilt their heads just so.

And they needed to be flexible.

What I learned spending 12 years of my life freezing my toes off is that balance is good, but it’s nothing without its partner in crime, flexibility.

I think about this sometimes as a homeschooling mom.

We have so many roles – we are wives and mothers, and the souls of our homes. We are chefs and chauffeurs.

We often have to drop one thing to do another, and on our best days, we change gears quickly with smiles on our faces.

But other days … other days it all feels like a lot. It feels more like juggling than skating. We feel like we’re spinning plates and everything is crashing around us.

One of the questions I get most frequently from fellow homeschooling mamas is how to “balance” everything.

How do you work from home, they’ll ask, and still manage to homeschool your kids?

When you strive to be flexible, you’re making a mindshift. You can suddenly focus on what needs to be done most in a given moment – whether it’s parenting, spouse-ing, homeschooling, working or housekeeping.

And you don’t have to feel bad about focusing on that, because you know you’ll switch to something else when it needs to take priority.

It isn’t always easy, but here are a few things that help me:

Saying no

It’s a lot easier to handle multiple things when there are fewer multiple things, right?

So over the years, I’ve learned to say no more and more. Learning about essentialism has helped me a lot. It reminded me that it’s OK to say no to good opportunities that aren’t a good fit.

It’s pretty consistent after reading your posts that i walk away
with having given myself a boost in some way. We all need those boosts
from time to time and most of the time… daily. Although I know I am far
from having it all together on a given day, I love my family and it motivates me to do what will better our lives in the moment, whether doing the dishes or reading that read aloud…it’s all good!

Thank you! And YES – all the contributions we make on a daily basis are valuable. Homeschooling means that the lines get really blurry sometimes, but if we have at our core a love for our families, you start to see that it’s all important, from making breakfast, to balancing the check-book, to teaching math, to making dentist appointments. <3

I love the ideas in this article, Kara. I feel like I’m in a season of twirling lots of plates and just trying to drop them in alternating categories of my life. 🙂

I think there is a lot of wisdom in flexibility. The challenge for me is — how do I continue to keep our goals and vision in the center? The flexibility works very well when there are urgent and important things — deadlines, a pile of dishes, a sick kid. But in the midst of all that, I find that I have trouble prioritizing those important but not-urgent things — my own writing, spiritual formation practices for my kids, reading for personal growth. Do you have any tips on working those non-urgent things into a flexible life? When do those things take priority?

That is hard. One thing that helps me is bullet journaling, and keeping my bigger picture goals available, but also making daily lists for the screaming but smaller stuff – filling the tires, paying the gas bill, etc.

I like to wake up early and chart things out – my to-do lists become my priorities for the day, but that gives me a deep breath moment to keep in mind the other stuff and how to make sure they are being considered too. I find if I don’t purposely take time to just think, I end up getting swept up in the river of endless to-dos.